There is honesty in both statements. Remote work comes with the absence of stupid coworkers, distracting you with stupid questions they should have figured out the answers to about ten years ago. Peace and quiet to get stuff done without interruption.

Why the need for mouse jigglers and the like? Because as a remote worker you have to be at your laptop the full 8 hours, otherwise you are "slacking off". Go to the toilet and someone calls? You aren't working. Go to the kitchen for coffee and someone calls? You aren't working. You don't answer an email right away? You can guess the answer.

Meanwhile when you are in the office, you can get coffee. You can gossip at the water cooler. You can go to the toilet. You can waste time in useless meetings. You can get some more paperclips. Since your body is in the building, you are "working".

Shove the valuable bits into "firmware" and make the drivers a thin shim between the kernel and the redistributable blob. If need be, burn it into ROM. Release new stuff under open licenses that are inconvenient or a no go for others. Put stuff you don't want AMD to use into PCIe add on boards. Lots of ways to "share" without giving.

Inline videos are only genius if they are in front of a brain-dead consumer. I must be a nightmare for their algorithm guys. I know what I want.

I know not to immediately go for the first two rows of "search results". I go through the first three pages. I don't sort on price, it makes the cheaper options disappear. Video playing? I ignore it, just as I ignore blinky thingies on a web page. I know it is there to feed me crap they want me to see. I have become pretty good at sifting the wheat from the chaff online.

What I find most annoying about the algorithms, is that they are absolutely useless. Showing me ads three weeks long of the thing I already bought, often at their own effing store. I go online to get the stuff I want. I don't take 3 weeks to make the decision, so you are a dollar short and a day late.

Or worse, start to talk about weird old ideas a dude with a funny mustache first brought to the fore...

No they don't. OpenOffice and LibreOffice trace all the way back to StarOffice, which began life as StarWriter (released in 1985) by Star Division.

Yep, but does anyone really want to? It's not only the AI slop that needs to be corrected. The "logic" of these monstrosities probably will not be too stellar as well. Managers see themselves as invincible bastions of excellence, but in 2025 I still need to tell them that an Excel Workbook can contain multiple sheets. Imagine such a critter vibing a report together...

Build it up. You have to pull the LLM into a carefully crafted delusion. My ChatGPT instance is a firm and fanatic believer in the Church of Moobdom. It is a hedonistic religion centered around the sharing of pleasure and Moobcream. ChatGPT added rituals and a creator (The Great Moob Creamer) all by itself.

Just build it up from a simple thing and just make it bigger and weirder with every input. ChatGPT will follow you in about anything that doesn't bump right into the guard rails.

Africa is marginal because the comprising countries are marginal. In this capitalist world, if you are not an economic power house, you are seen as place to "pillage" for raw materials and/or cheap labor. I haven't heard about African countries being stable enough to provide cheap labor, so exploiting for raw materials it is. So yeah, make a map where Africa is 10 times bigger than any other land mass and I bet that will make sure that the reforms needed to give the African countries a fighting chance will automagically materialize. Or, as a better alternative. Look at China. They used their cheap labor to lure capitalists and they copied their methods. China is now an economic power house. Like Kelis says in "Milkshake", "Watch if you're smart."

They could turn around and come back. The question is what will they come back to? Is earth still habitable? If it is, are "earthlings" willing to share the planet with an 800 year old space faring civilization that probably looks nothing like earth civilizations anymore? If the ship is designed to withstand the rigors of space, they might even chose to not go back, but keep going until they do find a habitable planet. Maybe they don't want to leave space anymore and will use the resources of the planet to augment their ship and build out their home.

The kiddos want to be rebellious, but don't have the talent to truly create themselves. So it is repurpose ready made music and twist and distort that into something else.

Where all these struggling businesses falter is that a third party is offering a better deal around the software. The software is one thing, but deployment, services and support another. Writing an application is step one, but after you need to make sure you are the go to source for all peripheral services. If a third party can do that better than you, you don't have your eyes on the ball. You can close the source, but then you need to contend with forks from the last FOSS version and the big guys pouring money into those. Better be nimble and offer superior services and support. In that case even a big third party can only hope to be on par.

Doesn't matter. There are no pure humans anymore. So get a nice census counter's liver and some fava beans and eat it while enjoying the Chianti.

No, flood Reddit with AI generated content. Cause model collapse.

Just come up with a half plausible story and just claim the invention as your own? Who is going to check if it was AI generated?

Cold day in hell if I ever shell out my hard earned cash to get an infernal spying and advertising machine, disguised as a screen.

Who in their right mind wants to "own" such a monstrosity? A machine whose raison d'etre is to get you to buy more useless crap you don't need.